


The Maiden's Tale

by ivoryandhorn



Category: The Decemberists - The Hazards of Love (album)
Genre: 1000-3000 words, Backstory, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-24
Updated: 2009-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-05 05:04:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/38093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivoryandhorn/pseuds/ivoryandhorn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>And so our heroine withdraws / To the taiga</em></p><p> </p><p>(This being the account of what she encountered there, and what she became therein.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Maiden's Tale

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Vivien](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vivien/gifts).



> I was going to tack another warning on here just in case but I think really, all I'm going to say is to keep the pairing in mind when deciding whether or not to read this and uh. Yeah.
> 
> Also, Vivien -- hi! Um, I wouldn't be surprised if this happened not to be your cup of tea. I'd pretty much decided I couldn't get anything written for it during Yuletide Madness, when events conspired to drop this story in its more-or-less finished state into my mind. So writing this was a bit frenzied, but I do like the result even as I wander around asking myself where the hell it came from. I hope it's not too far from what you had in mind with your request to enjoy.

In those days the woods were not quite so wild as they are now, though they were a good deal less dangerous: its skin, one might say, better matched its innards. One only had to see glimpse the wood's trees to know that it was a place where neither man nor woman nor child ought to tread: in winter, bare black fingertips shivered and rattled in the passing wind like dancing skeletons, and in the spring verdant leaves unfurled all along the woods' boughs in poisonous glee, the exact shade of serpentine warning. Shade overtook light within a handful of minutes' walk into the woods, and beasts lurked between the trunks who could be felled by neither sword nor axe nor bow. They were the woods of holy men or mad men or both, for the line was thin in those days: only the holy hoped to survive what lurked within the woods, and only the mad thought to test the theory.

We cannot say why she fled there, nor even why she thought it was a suitable place for fleeing: surely a nunnery perched atop wind-wracked cliffs or the local lord's bedchamber wreathed in smoke and silk would have served better to protect her from whatever gave her cause to flee. Perhaps it was that precise point that made her flee in the first place; there is little recourse, out where the taiga sprawls wild and hungry, for those maidens who find themselves wronged, and perhaps it is not too forward to suggest that braving the dark woods and the beasts therein may well have seemed preferable to her than the solitude of prayer or the caress of some loathsome stranger.

Whatever her reasons, flee to the woods she did, this maiden of ours, and though she was either holy nor mad, or perhaps precisely because this was the case, the woods chose to leave her be. Perhaps they were puzzled—for only hermits and hunters had heretofore been its only willing visitors. Perhaps the woods were lonely—would that not be your case, if all you had to keep you company were the ravings of madmen and the mumblings of ascetics? Whatever the case, when the maiden ended her helter-skelter flight, the woods had obligingly arranged for a clearing to be there waiting: grass springy beneath her tired feet, boughs spreading their leaves to shade her poor tired self from the sun, which dappled itself rather than burn her pale arms. Bushes rustled invitingly and made sure their plumpest berries showed her their sweetest faces, roots and tuber plumped up their stems and flowers. In her tired state, of course, the maiden hardly thought on all this and stuffed her face, for running without end is both a tiring and tiresome business.

She rested in the shade of a great tree, never noticing the boughs draw close over her while the sunlight considerately moved elsewhere to toy with the dust motes in the air. Wolves kept watch about her sleeping form, padding silently in and out of shadows, and bears crashed through the woods to rend her pursuers to pieces while the maiden slept, mouth stained all 'round with purple-red berry juice, sticky-sweet against her lips.

When the maiden woke she only thought to move, and pointed her feet deeper into the forest, or as near as she could hazard, for the woods was determined not to let this new treasure go and had carefully ensured the way outwards was exactly opposite where the maiden thought it might be. Her journeys were far removed from those that had first brought her into the embrace of the dark and lonesome woods, for now that it had a companion the woods were eager to please—sunlight made pretty patterns upon the ground to make her smile and a stream always snaked nearby to ensure that her thirst never lacked for quenching.

Being neither holy nor mad, the maiden noticed right quick that the woods leant to please her. Bushes were always ripe around her, trees always heaping with nuts. There was never no place for her to rest, she never lacked for water nor shade. The swift-footed stumbled to her in their old age and died peacefully at her feet, while flints unearthed themselves from the loamy soil and branches all but threw themselves to the ground, so eager were they to burn for the maiden's meat.

All this the maiden noticed, and repaid the woods with her soft words and a timid kiss or two—they did not know what she spoke, of course, but they could discern well enough the tenor of her speech, and it is right hard for even the woods to mistake the meaning of a kiss, however shyly offered.

Perhaps the maiden had thought to pierce the woods through and emerge on the other side, or to emerge eventually and slink to a new town that would point no fingers at a spinster maid, marking her as inflamer of lusts and inciter of fits. We cannot know her purpose now, if indeed she had any purpose to seeking succor in the dark woods beyond escape, final or no. We know only that she stayed.

The maiden's clothing tore on brambles, though they never dared touch her skin, and eventually what threads remained gasped their last and let loose their loads to be whipped away by the jealous wind, artifacts of man with no place upon the body of the woods' beloved. She laughed at the leaves they proffered, not unkind, perhaps discerning the thread of the wind's discontent, though she accepted a crown of wildflowers with a wild kiss, dragging fingers across rough bark in a careless caress. The maiden was much changed by her time in the woods, as you might well have guessed; she grew, as all humans must grow, and entered the full flower of her womanhood, while the sun laid its loving mark upon her browned skin.

Oh, it loved her so, did the woods. It loved the curve of her generous hip and her babble-brook laughter, the way her voice rose high to weld the forest noises into song or sank low, low, low to whisper secrets and nothings in the knotholes of its trees. It wanted its maiden to stay, to guard it against the whisperings of holy men and the sobbings of the mad, to scratch behind the ears of its wolves and scrape the sap from its maples all the rest of her days. And so it was one day that the maiden stumbled upon the heart of the woods, where stood a ring of weather beaten stones, upon which she read the runes that were ancient as time and had only been carved that morning by the nervous woods.

She turned to the tree that grew within the ring of carved stone, which tentatively blossomed for her, riotous plumage from ever bush and plant that called the woods home. She stepped towards it, did the maiden, utterly unafraid and root and vine reached out to twine about her sun-tanned limbs and draw her close. As the bark pressed rough against her naked breasts she kissed the tree, wrapped her arms about its mighty trunk, and we will not speak of what transpired there, between the standing stones with naught but the stars to hide their eyes in shame and peek between the fingers at the sound of the maiden's wordless cries.

When the night had passed—when the maiden emerged from the heart of the woods—she had been much changed. Flowers sprang up in her wake, bears lumbered after her with lovesick sighs, and her nut-brown skin had acquired a tinge of green about the fingers and nipples, lips and toes. Vines twined lovingly with each tangle of evergreen hair and her maple-sap eyes burned with all the beasts of the wood.

Stories began to be told—you may have heard some of these yourself, hunched over another midwinter's fire—of the woman who walked the woods bare as a babe, wolves tame as puppies panting for the touch of her hand and a crown of thorns, or vines, or leaves, or flowers upon her brow. A beautiful woman, who sucked the seed from unlucky men and drew their fever-bright eyes into the woods to never return. A gentle woman, overseer of children both lost or merely unwise. Men murmured over her, some in lust and some in fear, trading rumor for rumor as they sipped frost-cold ale. Grandmothers bent over their knitting and told stories of a Queen who went into the woods and became a witch, or of a witch who went into the woods and became a Queen—there was little enough difference between the two, in those days, and so the precise order did not matter quite so much as it might now. Children dared each other to enter her domain but none ever did, preferring the taunts of their fellows to the myriad fates that waited naughty children found by the Queen. For Queen she was now, consort to the woods, its lover and protector forever.

At least until the child came.

But that's a tale for another to tell, and my telling is done.


End file.
